Invitation to submit entries for the 2013 Leica Oskar Barnack Award

Leica Camera AG, Solms, once again invites professional photographers to submit entries to their international photography competition, the Leica Oskar Barnack Award. Photographers wishing to take part may submit their photographic projects online between 15 January and 1 March 2013. The terms and conditions of entry can be downloaded from www.leica-oskar-barnack-award.com shortly before the start of the competition.

The winner of the 2013 Leica Oskar Barnack Award will receive a Leica M camera with lens worth approximately €10,000 in addition to a cash prize of €5,000. A second honour in the course of the competition will be awarded in the category ‘Leica Oskar Barnack Newcomer Award’, for (prospective) professional photographers aged 25 and under. The winner of the first prize in this section will also be awarded a Leica rangefinder camera complete with lens. The awards will be presented in the course of the Rencontres Internationales de la Photographie photography festival to be held in Arles, France from 1 to 7 July 2013.

Competition entry conditions: An international jury awards the Leica Oskar Barnack Award/Leica Oskar Barnack Newcomer Award to photographers whose unerring powers of observation capture and express the relationship between man and their environment in graphic form in a portfolio of up to 12 images. Submissions must be a self-contained series of images in which the photographer perceives and documents the interaction between man and their environment with acute vision and contemporary visual style – creative, unobtrusive and groundbreaking. With this competition, Leica Camera AG remembers Oskar Barnack (1879–1936), the inventor of the Leica. From 1914 on, he increasingly used the prototype camera he developed, the so-called Ur-Leica, for photography. The history of photojournalism is closely tied to his invention, as, beginning in 1925, the compact and easily carried Leica cameras were instrumental in enabling entirely new and expressive forms of photography.